A ‘bit unpleasant’ is the phrase I’d use to describe the newest Blink Wink Production psychological thriller.

Starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs and Mia Goth, this latest thriller depicts the characteristics of your typical nail-biting suspense movie. The film begins, when the high-spirited young executive (DeHaan) is given the chore to retrieve the company’s CEO- Rolan Pembroke from the ‘wellness centre’ in a remote rural village in the Swiss Alps. There, he learns that Pembroke and the other patients are retrieving ‘the cure’, Lockhart (DeHaan) is left baffled with the type of treatments that are in place in the institute and becomes more suspicious. On the mission to retrieve Pembroke back to New York, he stumbles into conversations with fellow patient Victoria Watkins (Celia Imrie), in the centre’s garden; Lockhart learns that the spa was built on top of the ruins of castle that was owned by a barren which was burnt to the ground 200 years ago. The castle was said to be burnt due to a rebellion of peasants against the baron as he began to perform hellish ceremonies on victims to try to make his lover- his sister, fertile.

After Lockhart is involved in a car accident and breaks his leg, he is forced to endure in the treatments at the centre, where he meets Dr. Heinreich Volmer (Isaacs). Lockhart is put in some treatments and befriends a young girl- Hannah (Mia Goth), who classes herself as the ‘special case’. Lockhart observes that the young girl and the doctors in the spa all take vitamins from a small cobalt glass bottle. When Lockhart becomes more cautious on the whereabouts of Pembroke- Lockhart’s health starts to degrade. Suspicions rise further as Lockhart begins to lose his teeth and begins to hallucinate things; he tries to unravel the truth of the cobalt bottle and the truth about the baroness but is faced with other challenges along the way…

As a horror genre fanatic, I was excited to see this new movie when it was released in the cinemas . I read critics reviews about the movie and some quoted that the feature was rather ‘disturbing’ and had a ‘thin plot’. Those two aspects I can agree on: the movie itself is rather odd but after all that’s why it is classed as a thriller, identifying what is real and what is not, builds to thrill to watch those kind of movies. I have watched Shutter Island and the entire Saw trilogy both films are mysterious with a elements of torture and social anxiety within them. The Cure for Wellness contains that sense of tension and ‘the fear of the unknown’, similarly to Shutter Island, but has themes of pain and suffering seen in the Saw movies. But this movie covers the theme of incest and rape which is a subject that is not seen in most contemporary horrors, we’d more likely see sexual assault in historical crime dramas. Introducing incest and rape into a plot refers to the nail-biting nature of a thriller but also builds up that sense of awkwardness and comfortless. The plot itself was rather basic, it followed the traditions of a typical thriller with a main protagonist and a leading heroin, who later needs to be saved from evil. But, the use of torture and the mysteriousness of the overall setting made the plot a lot more exciting and enjoyable to witness.

Even though, the plot can be described as thin, it did have strong characters which moved the plot along well. The ending was disappointing; if you are as canning as I am you can probably predict the outcome 3/4 in.

Would I see this again?

Yes, but not with someone who asks multiple question every six seconds *cough* my boyfriend.